ABSTRACT
Despite geographers’ increasing concern with place-based politics, the effects of place-based social relations on collective political action remain largely untheorized. By emphasizing the free rider problem—why a rational, self-interested individual would engage in collective action when his/her impact is negligible and the benefits of collective action are public and free—rational choice theory correctly problematizes collective action. Its reliance on the essentialist homo económicas model of human nature, however, often leads to untenable solutions that do not consider nonstrategic forms of rationality, collective identity formation, and the crucial effects of place-specific social relations. Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, in contrast, provides a broader conception of rationality that recognizes communicative as well as strategic and instrumental forms of rationality and focuses on social interaction rather than on isolated individuals. Individuals reach common understandings, form communal bonds, and construct collective identities through communicative action. The relative importance of communicative versus strategic forms of action coordination varies geographically and historically and cannot be understood apart from systemic processes. As communicative forms of action coordination (based on communicative rationality) are “colonized” by systemic forms of action coordination (based on strategic and instrumental rationality) and destabilized by capital hypermobility, communal bonds break down. Places become less significant as bases for community and more significant in corporate location and investment decisions. These processes, however, engender resistance. Strong place-based communities mobilize when threatened and new forms of collective identity arise through channels created by time-space compression.
